Talk:List of climate change controversies: Difference between revisions

The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information.

Environment B‑class Low‑importance

This environment-related article is part of the WikiProject Environment to improve Wikipedia's coverage of the environment. The aim is to write neutral and well-referenced articles on environment-related topics, as well as to ensure that environment articles are properly categorized. Read Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ and leave any messages at the project talk page.EnvironmentWikipedia:WikiProject EnvironmentTemplate:WikiProject EnvironmentEnvironment articles B This article has been rated as B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

This article was nominated for deletion. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination: Keep, 12 June 2008, see discussion. speedy keep, 22 February 2007, see discussion.

This page is not a forum for general discussion about editors' personal beliefs about global warming. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about editors' personal beliefs about global warming at the Reference desk.

Subpages:

• /sides in the GW controversy

Archives
February 2003 – December 2004 December 2004 – February 2007 Febraury 2007 – March 2007 /Archive_4 /Archive_5 /Archive_6 /Archive_7

Template:Unsigned -->

Alright, I was trying to figure out where to post this, which is hard since someone has split up the discussion in 3 different threads. Anyway, I fail to see why the fact that "Certain scientists (...) believe this confidence in the models ability to predict future climate is not earned" is notable. That is hardly a surprising fact, one would assume, given enough scientists, that there would always be a few who didn't agree with the majority. I am very curious what makes this particular chemists views so interesting that it should be included in the encylopedia?
— Apis (talk) 00:08, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Apis, this is an article about global warming controversy. Readers want to know what aspects of the science around global warming are controversial and why. Lots of scientists are of the opinion the IPCC's confidence in the GCMs is not earned, but most have not published their views. Pat Frank's opinion is notable because he is an established researcher at an elite institution (Stanford) and his views were published in a notable magazine. Your viewpoint that it is not surprising that some scientists would feel this way is reasonable, but not particularly common. Let's say you were a student who read this article for a paper, would you be satisfied with the article if it did not discuss Pat Frank's views and you learned about his views later? I don't think so. I think you would be very dissatisfied with the article. If this were not an article about the controversy, Pat's views would not be notable. Since the article is about the controversy, why pretend there is no controversy around the GCMs? Is reverting the entry really providing a service to readers who want information about the controversy? How does that help or inform readers?RonCram (talk) 03:22, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Apis, I just looked at the article to see what the entry looks like now. I see that you had deleted everything but the IPCC view. That is hardly NPOV in an article about the controversy. Then you allowed in the bare statement that some people disagree, but you left the statement without any citation to either Pat Frank's view or Roger Pielke's view. I am restoring the citations, at the very least. I am willing to wait to see what Oren0 or other editors may think about the necessity of the quotes. RonCram (talk) 03:43, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously quoting the IPCC only was unacceptable, and I suspect that Apis realized this which is why he reinserted all but the quote. Obviously we can't provide every quote and link every article that comments on this issue. Our goal should be to try to reflect the most common arguments on both sides. The problem is that some of the editors of this page will call OR/SYN if we try to draw any conclusions from anything, so all we can really do is quote people. I think the reasonable thing to do is to quote the IPCC and then try to find one or two quotes from dissenters that summarize the general points we're seeing. I'd like to point out in terms of weight concerns that the previous revision had a much longer quote from the IPCC than from the skeptic side. Oren0 (talk) 03:57, 23 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad you noticed that I put that section back in, If you check carefully you will see that I didn't remove the other items you mentioned either. I only removed the reference to the text by Pat Frank that was inside the block quote, since it was a reference to the quote. I'm not sure the references indicate fully what the sentence is saying though. I have only had time to check the article by pat frank, but I presume the other source also refer to a reliable source by a credited scientist who express concern about the validity of the IPCCs confidence in the GCMs. As you suggest, lets say I was a student who read this article for a paper, would I be upset if it didn't mention Pat Frank? Well that depends. Lets say I read an article about the Earth, would I be upset if it didn't mention the flat earth society's opinion on the shape of the earth? No, most likely not. I would however be very upset if it did indicate that some scientists believed the earth was flat, and I later found out that the flat earth society's opinion only reflect a tiny minority view. What I am concerned about here is that we invent a controversy that don't really exist (except for a tiny minority). That would be very misleading, don't you agree?
— Apis (talk) 01:46, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just looked at the other reference in the article, and it appears my assumption was incorrect. It looks like it refer to a blog about climate science discussing a website called "RealClimate". I don't think that is relevant at all in this case. I think it would be appropriate to have a reference that somehow show that the IPCCs confidence in GCM is indeed a notable controversy, and not the opinion of one (or a small minority) of scientists.
— Apis (talk) 02:01, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Lets say I read an article about the Earth, would I be upset if it didn't mention the flat earth society's opinion on the shape of the earth? No, most likely not." - This isn't the global warming page. Just try adding anything there that diverts even 1% from the consensus and see what happens to your edit. This is a page about the controversy, and as such controversy belongs. If you were a student who wanted to read about global warming, you'd check out global warming or scientific opinion on climate change. If you wanted to read about the controversy, I think that leaving out controversy regarding models would be a noticeable omission. I would also say that there is no evidence that doubting the accuracy of GCMs is a "tiny minority" view. Especially, again, given the rather awful predictive performance of these models to date. Oren0 (talk) 02:20, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Its about the controversy... yes. But its about the part of the controversy that is notable - its not just a page collecting quotes from individuals. I have nothing against a section on Models and the public controversy about it - in fact i agree that there must be meat to be found here. What i am against is cherry-picking primary sources to generate a completely original take on it. The correct way to do it, is to find some reliable secondary sources, and then flesh it out with primary sources. (as for the IPCC quote - i frankly don't see what it does on the page - except as the only part of Ron's addition that survived.... get rid of it (imho). --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 10:23, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Basically I agree with what Kim is saying here. I'm not convinced there is any "meat" to be found though. To me it seems rather ridiculous to question the IPCCs faith in models, "because they are only models". I mean, there might be some argument on what should go in to the model and what not, but the use of models should not be an issue (i would have thought). Whats important in this case though is getting some reliable sources for the claim that there is controversy about this (if there is, it shouldn't be hard to find), and then we can discuss exactly what it should say. I agree that only having the IPCC quote is rather silly and pointless which is why I put back some of what I originally removed. It would probably be better to simply remove the entire section but I didn't want to be overly confrontational about it since it is constantly being reinserted. (It is generally better to discuss changes on the talk page instead of reverting back and forth). (As for what Ron originally put into the article, that was obviously wp:syn as was said to begin with.)
— Apis (talk) 16:39, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well 5 minutes of Googling points me to David Douglass's paper in the International Journal of Climatology: "Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean" [1]. This was also picked up in other sources/media: [2] [3] [4] [5]. I could also point to other stories/articles: [6] [7] but I think this is "meaty" enough to start. Oren0 (talk) 17:22, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Those are basically rewrites of the same press-release (some are even verbatim). I was looking for something a bit more substantial. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 19:24, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(dedent) How do we feel about the most recent attempted addition over at global warming? This seems to fit into what we're talking about here.

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, indicates that the "current climate models exaggerate the impact of carbon dioxide on temperature because of a poor understanding and representation of the feedback effects due to clouds and water vapor.” Professor Lindzen further states "Attributing global warming to the rise in greenhouse gases has been reduced to an issue of religious faith modulated by policy relevance." [8]

How much of this is usable? Oren0 (talk) 04:59, 28 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Blow for the skeptics  :)

Upper troposphere is warming after all, research shows

Research performed in the US has helped lay to rest one of the lasting controversies surrounding climate models: whether or not the upper troposphere is warming.

Climate models have long predicted that the upper troposphere — a region of the Earth’s atmosphere that lies beneath the stratosphere at an altitude of 10–12 km — should be warming at least as fast as the surface. However, since the 1970s temperature measurements carried out by weather balloons have found the lower-troposphere temperature to be fairly constant. This conclusion was backed up in 1990, when researchers used data taken from satellites to measure temperature changes in the troposphere.

For a while climate scientists have known that weather-balloon instruments are affected by the warming effect of the Sun’s light. They have also struggled to interpret the extent to which the satellite data of the troposphere could be influenced by the stratosphere. But the awareness of these uncertainties has not made it any clearer as to what temperature changes, if any, are taking place in the upper troposphere.

Now, Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood of Yale University have used wind data taken from weather balloons as a proxy for direct temperature measurements to give the first conclusive evidence that the upper troposphere has been warming after all. Although they are an indirect measure of temperature, these wind records can be backed up by satellite and ground instruments, making them more reliable than existing direct temperature measurements (Nature Geoscience doi: 10.1038/ngeo208).

‘Put the controversy to rest’ Allen and Sherwood took wind data from 341 weather-balloon stations — 303 in the northern hemisphere and 38 in the southern hemisphere — covering a period from 1970 to 2005. To covert the data to temperature measurements, they employed a relationship known as the thermal-wind equation, which describes how vertical gradients in wind speed change with horizontally varying temperature. They found that the maximum warming has occurred in the upper troposphere above the tropics at 0.65 ± 0.47 °C per decade, a rate consistent with climate models.

“This research really does show the tropical troposphere has been warming over the past three decades,” says Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “And it will, I hope, put this controversy of weather balloon and satellite data to rest.” Santer, who was one of the lead authors of the 1995 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, thinks the next step is to confirm Allen and Sherwood’s findings with direct temperature records. These, he explains, must be taken with advanced weather-balloon instruments that can be calibrated against older models to remove biases.

“The approach by Allen and Sherwood is a promising start,” says John Lanzante of Princeton University. “But more confidence can be established as other investigations further scrutinize the wind data and method used to translate winds into temperature-equivalent measures.”

Count Iblis (talk) 13:26, 30 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In science it is normal for people to put forward different hypotheses and debate their merit back and forth - often for a long time - this is not a controversy, this is how it works. That thousands, possibly tens of thousands of uneducated idiots who spout ill informed opinion based on emotion still doesn't mean there is a controversy. To keep this article with this name is like having a "evolution controversy" - which doesn't exist either. --IceHunter (talk) 02:33, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree if you interpret "controversy" as "scientific controversy". I think we should make this clear in the lead of the article. We should mention that in the scientific community global warming is not controversial, that the controversy is political in nature. Count Iblis (talk) 02:40, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that sounds like a good idea.
—Apis (talk) 11:55, 6 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have never edited an article on wikipedia, so I feel I should post my 2 cents on the talk page. The chart concerning percents agreeing with statements is, from a statistical standpoint, very biased. I have not read the original chart that the data is taken from, but it is a fallacy to present the view sought in the information requested. It's of my opinion that someone who knows a bit more about the subject matter on this page either find a slightly less onesided chart to post on a secular page concerning an ongoing debate, or at least go over the original survey (assuming the information was changed to be placed on this site)to ensure that wikipedia remains secular on this subject.

An alternate solution would be to make sure that there is a note at the bottom of the chart stating that there may be bias in the survey. All of this may seem anal retentive, but then again, it's an encyclopedia. 2:12, June 8, 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.89.52 (talk) 09:19, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't quite understand your concern. I assume you speak about the table in the "History of public opinion" section? The data is taken from published polls, as far as I can tell without further analysis. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:58, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's a bit hard for me to explain, but asking a question that essentially includes the answer is virtually guaranteed to garner the answer "yes". Each question seems to fit that bill, not presenting the person with the option of "Is global warming occuring?" but with "Do you agree that global that global warming is probably occuring?". That "probably" qualifier presents bias in the polls. Again, I'm probably just going a bit overboard with this, but I still think there should be a little note at the bottom stating that the poll data could be in favor of one side.

Aha! Yes, but then the table is only the summary of the polls in the cited sources. The original polls gave multiple (and hopefully exhaustive) options. Check e.g. [9] and [10], two of the sources. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:54, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The polls from ABC seem pretty much the same, but has another chart on there that might be a little bit better. I'll go ahead and add that one and put in a footnote on the other chart that there may have been some issues in the polling, since they don't really site there charts very well in it. Tomorrow, of course, since I don't have an account. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.89.52 (talk) 05:59, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)Be careful of not adding your own analysis thought, since it might be WP:OR. I feel that as long as the questions are equivalent, as suggestive as they may be, when ask over time they serve a purpose (again, as long as the poll asks essentially the same thing.) More to the point, the "probably" in the question does not affect what this table shows since the word was contained in both questions. The percentage in each case is not important, the change in percentage over time is. Brusegadi (talk) 06:04, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'll keep that in mind. A little caption below the chart would probably solve all problems, but it's not going to let me make the change on a new profile. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Blueguy90 (talk • contribs) 05:09, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can paste your change here (what you would want) and if people agree I can do it for you. Or, wait a few days (make a few edits) and you should be able to edit semi-protected articles. Brusegadi (talk) 06:23, 10 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The link to the Scientific American article "Skeptisizm about Sceptics" appears to be a dead link. Can someone please fix this? I can't seem to find the article. Maybe one needs to subscribe to Sci. Am. Mag to get it.--CurtisSwain (talk) 10:04, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dead link, but still on web.archive. --Van helsing (talk) 10:47, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It appears we have an issue with reverts and opinions on what is a scientific link or not. I have no problem placing a POV tag on this article if the vandalism of edits doesn't cease. You don't like someone's opinion, then discuss it here not with your delete key. --THE FOUNDERS INTENT ^TALK 13:20, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, since you have implied I might have a WP:OWN issue with the article I have checked my edits. As far as I can see I have edited it twice in the last ten months... BUT I did FIVE EDITS in July 2007 so obviously it is my personal property. --BozMo talk 13:39, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fine, then give equal examination to the other links, and don't single out one that is obviously at least as good as some of those. You want to place a standard on links, fine by all means. But don't selectively apply the standard, because it came from an "advocacy" group (OMG evil). PhDs at advocacy group = evil liars; PhDs at university or eco-news group = honest brokers. --THE FOUNDERS INTENT ^TALK 14:24, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You've said that twice now, and I am listening. Which other links do you have a problem with? --BozMo talk 14:28, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Note that peer review is important in science, not the title of the author. I have published many papers before I was a Ph.D. in peer reviewed journals. That's all valid science. I may write some opinion in some paper and sign with "Prof. Dr. Count Iblis", but that signature adds nothing to the scientific value of the paper. Count Iblis (talk) 15:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Since the WP:OWNers of these pages seem to be sensitive to someone being WP:BOLD I thought I would ask here first. Is there some (legitimate) reason not to add something along the lines of:

In Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills Stewart Dimmock sought to prevent the educational use of An Inconvenient Truth within the UK on the grounds that schools are legally required to provide a balanced presentation of political issues. The judge in this case ruled that the global warming research presented in the film was used to make a political statement and to support a political program.^[1]

in the litigation section? I have tried to condense the summary material found at Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills and An Inconvenient Truth to make this as short as possible while still providing a reasonable overview. --GoRight (talk) 15:40, 1 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]